Technical Field
The present invention relates to a wiring harness evaluation apparatus used in designing vehicles.
Related Art
In designing a vehicle, a computer is used to evaluate a wiring harness. For example, a patent document JP-A-2011-210174 discloses a technique of the evaluation. According to the technique, a path of a wiring harness is determined from the locations of the electronic control units (ECUs) in the vehicle. Further, various components (e.g., electric wires, connectors, tubes, etc.) necessary for designing the wiring harness are selected based on the information on the wiring path (e.g., temperatures, waterproofed/non-waterproofed, etc.) and the information on the ECUs (e.g., rated current) as objects to be connected. Then, the cost and weight of the components and the length of the wiring of the wiring harness are evaluated.
The design of a wiring harness greatly depends on the functional allocation of ECUs. However, in the conventional art as set forth above, the evaluation of a wiring harness is based on an idea that the functional allocation of ECUs has a generally-known pattern. Therefore, this raises a problem that optimum results will not be necessarily derived from the evaluation.